For the second year in a row North Kingdom was asked to create a digital experience to accompany the annual Swedish public tv-tradition "Julkalendern". Every day in December leading up to Christmas Eve a new episode was broadcasted, telling the immersive story about three young kids in search of the legendary pirate captain Aquila's long lost treasure. Needless to say, we pretty quickly felt that our task was to give the young and adult kids of Sweden a kick-ass pirate game, and so we did. Through 24 levels the player was offered an indulging adventure in a vast archipelago with countless individual islands and extra missions, a pretty hard to beat level system and heartfelt story that nested well into the one of the tv-series.

The game needed to work on a variety of devices and platforms - iOS, Android and desktop - and this work flow was kind of our only way out. At the moment Unity still demanded a download action for desktop browsers which our client wanted to avoid due to the fairly young target group, otherwise that would have been a solution with more options regarding the game views and asset animations. Working with a top view perspective proved to be quite a challenge when it comes to finding static angles that both appeal to the eye yet still make sense when scrolling a landscape (where the angle of the object otherwise would be affected).

This was a great opportunity for me to use learnings from my involvement in last year's experience. For different reasons we chose to use the software flow from previous development which helped us get into testing fairly quickly, focusing on the adventure type of gameplay that we set out create. Using Cinema 4D, Photoshop and After Effects we created the visual assets which then was implemented into gameplay through Flash and the level building software Tiled.